Finalists for the Dream-Build-Play competition (a Microsoft XNA Game Studio contest) were recently announced, with the winners to be revealed on August 13th. A publishing contract with XBox Live Arcade is up for grabs.

Graham - are you even aware of 'bullet hell' shooters? You're not meant to be focusing on fancy ways of defeating bosses. You're meant to hold down fire and focus on the HUNDREDS OF BULLETS, and try and avoid getting hit.

http://images.tabulas.com/4265/l/danmaku.jpg

The player in the video there did remarkably well, in fact, weaving between tiny gaps in complex bullet patterns. It looks like you get a health-bar, but I doubt it will last very long against that kind of firepower.

I'm perfectly aware of bullet hell games and while they aren't my favourite genre at least they generally have the decency not to fudge things with a health bar. Health bars in shoot 'em ups are an admission of sloppy design, IMHO.

Anyway, I still think it looks bad with overuse of special effects obscuring what's going on and a perfectly abysmal "camera" (or lack thereof) which allows the player to get too close to the edge of the screen and lets them be obscured by the boss when they move behind it despite the game being in a circular arena which the camera could have circled around to negate the problem.

And just because an enemy spews bullets at you, it doesn't mean that you can't invest an iota of interesting gameplay design into it.

Why aren't any of the Burning Angels ladies wearing any pants? Does that bother anybody else? They're running around with their arses out! Even if the gameplay is spot-on, I'd be too embarrassed to play it or discuss playing it.

I wonder if whoever was directing the art said: "Well, we have a really solid shooter now with some incredible looking bosses, but I just don't think it will give a single teenager an erection. I'm swapping the pants for something more arse-revealing, maybe a piece of string wedged up there. Make sure we put it on the title screen too, in case people are worried there won't be any arses in the game. Awesome!"

That boss is pretty cool. So obviously they have some talent. And those models, despite being vehicles for displaying a lady-arse, were put together with some skill. But instead of making the characters something cool (even if generic) it became an arse-game.

From their website:"The characters and weapons are pleasing to both the eye and the mind, too."

That's creepy. I couldn't enjoy that game any more than I could enjoy a cup of coffee if I knew it was brewed by a naked clown.

It looked pretty cool to me, but it raised a question about games in general.

How come most bosses in games attack in a pattern, instead of relative to the player? Even just shooting straight at the player all the time, or using more complicated strategies... For some reason, they just follow patterns, or attack straight at the player only now and then and waste their bullets/rockets/breath/dashing the rest of the time. Why do they do that?